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VMScape and why Xen dodged it
ETH Zürich’s new VMScape attack hit KVM and VMware, but Xen’s microkernel-like design kept it out of reach.
It’s a neat piece of work, and it shows once again how CPUs, with all their clever tricks for performance, can sometimes open the door to data leaks across virtual machines. The core stays minimal, with a narrow set of responsibilities, and anything that doesn’t absolutely need to run at the highest privilege level gets pushed out. As the ETH Zürich team points out, mitigations for KVM involve adding new predictor flushes, which Linux developers have already started to implement.
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